My name is Marcos González. I’m a professional economist. So far my professional career path has been as an independent consultant on economics and management consulting projects. Extensive research I have carried out on finance and ecology has allowed me to realize that all the evidence proves that business as usual, or the productive practices of humankind since agriculture became widespread tens of thousands of years ago are completely unsustainable and have been destroying global ecology.
Since the Industrial Revolution, it has become possible to raise the living standards for humanity worldwide but this has meant the scale of ecological destruction worldwide and the rate at which the planet is being devastated by humankind have increased to the point that now the future survival of thousands of millions is in danger.
Regeneration of desertified land.
Here’s just a glance at some of the available evidence that unarguably proves humankind is living unsustainably: humankind, and particularly the most developed countries in the world have emitted an estimated 2035 gigatons of CO2 (1 gigaton = 10^9 tons) since 1750. There’s also the 6 billion hectares of lands degraded and half of the total planetary stock of trees (there used to exist an estimated 6 x 10^12 trees thousands of years ago while now only 3 x 10^12 are left) by unsustainable human practices in approximately the last 10,000 years.
The evidence keeps piling up; 2014 was the hottest year on record until 2015 came along, but then 2016 topped them all in becoming hottest year since records began. Global overpopulation of 8 billion, 70% of wildlife lost in the last 50 years, all the brittle ecosystems on earth made uninhabitable by human activity, climate disruption, pollinators’ populations under stress, unsustainable industrial food production destroying topsoil and water bodies at an unstoppable rate, ocean acidification, greenhouse gases concentrations in the atmosphere at twice their usual levels since humankind has been around, and the list goes on, seemingly forever.
I created this video on desertification for a number of reasons:
- Because it is one of the gravest problems worldwide.
- Because desertification is the most extreme state that land degradation can get to. After all the vegetation in an ecosystem has been destroyed and/or overgrazed to the ground, things can’t get any worse than that. even visually, materials that depict desertification are some of the most striking and indisputable evidence of the effects of human unsustainable living even to the uninitiated observer.
- Because it is widely believed that once an ecosystem has been degraded to permanent desert there’s no way to regenerate it to an state where regenerated extended vegetation can sustain itself and be self sufficient and self replicating. However as the audiovisual materials from the projects featured in my video show, it is possible to regenerate desertified – extremely degraded ecosystems in large scale sustainably and productively.
The methodologies that the projects depicted in my video followed are quite complex but in essence if water catchment capacity for a particular area can be increased and a complete vegetation ground cover can be established, it is possible to gradually reverse desertification. You can email me at gonzalezmarcos@protonmail.com